After Ebola criticisms, WHO plans for 4-month epidemic response

GENEVA, July 31 (Reuters) - The World Health Organization is
creating a "blueprint" to improve the medical response to major
outbreaks of diseases, after it was accused of reacting too
slowly to West Africa's Ebola epidemic, it said on Friday.

"The goal is to reduce the time from recognition of an
outbreak to the availability of new medical tools to four months
or less," WHO Director-General Margaret Chan told a news
conference in Geneva.

"Doing so, I believe, will leave the world better prepared
for the next inevitable medical emergency. No one wants to see
clinicians, doctors, left empty handed again."

The plan is likely to cover influenza strains such as H5N1
and could help prepare for a worsening spread of Middle East
Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), among other diseases, WHO officials
said.

The proposal is part of a swathe of reforms designed to
avoid a repetition of the U.N. health agency's slow response to
the Ebola epidemic, which has killed 11,294 people and has yet
to be fully snuffed out in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

The WHO is hoping to learn from the development of an Ebola
vaccine, which has proceeded at lightning speed compared to
normal drug development but only really took off once the Ebola
outbreak was already at crisis point.

One potential Ebola vaccine has been shown to be 100 percent
effective, trial data showed on Friday.

When the next epidemic comes, the WHO wants the tools to
tackle it much more quickly. It plans to analyse diagnostics,
vaccines, drugs and other medical equipment, and wants to take
research far enough so that the products could reach the final
phase of efficacy testing within four months of an outbreak.

"Based on our experience of Ebola and our earlier experience
of pandemic influenza, in some diseases it's very difficult to
develop innovations, especially from scratch, in four months,"
Chan said.

WHO Assistant-Director-General Marie-Paule Kieny said: "What
we have started to work on ... is to see what should be done for
other diseases of epidemic potential, prior to any epidemic
starting."

The plan will set up "step-by-step procedures, protocols,
collaborative agreements, codes of conduct, and ideal product
profiles that can be put in place in advance," Chan said.

The blueprint is expected to be presented to the WHO's
annual conference of health ministers, the World Health
Assembly, in 2016, Kieny said.
(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)